During the first half of the twentieth century, waterskiing emerged as a popular recreational activity, allowing individuals to ski behind a boat on a lake, river, or ocean. The first waterski boats, however, were wooden boats that produced large wakes because of the weight of the boats. In search of a smaller wake, which is advantageous for waterskiing, the first fiberglass inboard waterski boat was designed and built in the early 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and today, inboard ski boat manufacturers continue to refine ski boat designs to produce the smallest, softest, cleanest wakes behind the boat at speeds in excess of 25 mph. These competition waterski boats, which are still manufactured today, are closed bow, flat-bottomed boats with a direct drive inboard engine mounted in the center of the boat. The shape of the hull is optimized to create small, soft wakes for tournament waterskiing, but the hull does not perform well on public waterways, which are often larger and more crowded than private waterski lakes. In addition, because the ski rope is attached to a ski pylon in front of the engine, passengers cannot sit in the back of the boat while a skier is skiing because the ski rope swings back and forth at head-height above the rear seat. As such, a day on the lake for a competition water-skier may only include one or two other people.
In the 1990s, inboard boat manufacturers began designing and manufacturing larger boats as a result of increased demand for boats that were comfortable for an entire family and that performed better on larger, public waterways. At the same time, and a result of the growing popularity of snowboarding, wakeboarding emerged as a popular alternative to competition slalom waterskiing. Unlike waterskiing, where a waterskier attempts to stay low on the surface of the water in order to increase his or her speed back and forth around buoys set in a slalom course, a wakeboarder attempts to perform tricks such as flips (“inverts”) or spins when jumping the wakes behind the boat. Therefore, a new style of inboard boat emerged that provided wakeboarders with larger, firmer wakes needed to perform wakeboard tricks.
Compared to competition waterski boats, wakeboard boats are larger, open bow boats with a deep-V hull, a V-drive engine mounted in the rear of the boat, and a tower to attach the tow rope at an elevated point above the boat. By placing the engine in the rear of the boat and connecting the rope to the tower above the boat, wakeboard boats allow passengers to sit in wraparound-style seating while a wakeboarder is towed behind the boat. Wakeboard boats also include ballast systems to weight the hull of the boat down and displace more water, and therefore generate larger wakes behind the boat for wakeboarding. These ballast systems may be in the form of removable ballast bags, factory-installed ballast bags, internal hard plastic tanks, or lead weight positioned throughout the boat. With each ballast system, the goal is to create large, firm, and symmetrical wakes approximately 50 to 80 feet behind the boat when the boat is travelling between 18 and 25 mph.
In recent years, wakesurfing has emerged as a popular counterpart to wakeboarding, allowing a surfer to surf behind the same wakeboard boat without having to travel to the ocean. Compared to wakeboarding, wakesurfing is easier to learn, has a lower risk of injury, is performed closer to the boat, and has become just as popular, if not more popular, than wakeboarding. Wakesurfing, however, requires a different ballast configuration in a traditional wakeboarding boat than wakeboarding. The desired wakesurfing wake is located on one side (starboard, right, or driver's side; port, left, or passenger's side) of the boat, creating an asymmetrical wakesurf wake between approximately 5 and 20 feet behind the boat when the boat is travelling between 5 and 15 mph.
Conventional wakeboard boat ballast systems place hundreds or even thousands of pounds of water ballast in bags or tanks in the bow, midship, port stern, and/or starboard stern sections of the boat. For wakeboarding, all ballast is typically filled, creating a large, firm, symmetrical wake behind the boat at wakeboarding speeds. For wakesurfing, the ballast is only filled on one side of the boat, leaving the ballast on the opposite side empty. This configuration “sinks” or “lists” one side of the boat, tipping the boat and creating a large, unsymmetrical wake for wakesurfing on the listed side of the boat at wakesurfing speeds.
Conventional wakesurfing ballast configurations, however, have many disadvantages. First, by weighting only one side of the boat, the boat is unbalanced and difficult to control at slower speeds. After a surfer falls, it is difficult and dangerous to return to the fallen surfer at slower speeds and with reduced visibility. Second, traditional ballast takes up a large portion of the boat's storage capacity. Third, moving the ballast from one side to the other to create a surf wake on the opposite side can be difficult, time consuming, and cumbersome. With removable ballast tanks, an external pump is needed to fill or empty the tanks with water. These external pumps often leak and require priming in order to siphon water out of the tanks when emptying. Emptying one side and filling the opposite side with just one pump may take 20 minutes or more, depending on the speed of the pump. With internal hard ballast tanks, the ballast tanks may be filled or emptied with internal ballast pumps at the same time, reducing the time to switch sides, but still may take 10 minutes or more, depending on the speed of the pumps. As a result, in order to minimize the time spent filling and emptying ballast during a day on the lake, all wakeboarding is typically done at the same time, all left-side (port) surfing is done together, and all right-side (starboard) surfing is done together. However, this is inconvenient and requires undesired advanced planning to set the ballast for each rider's desired ballast configuration.
As a result, an improved wake shaping system that can be used interchangeably for wakeboarding, left-side surfing, and right-side surfing with one ballast configuration and without requiring filling or emptying of individual ballast tanks, listing the boat dangerously to one side, or lifting of the transom, which reduces the size of the wakeboarding or wakesurfing wakes is desired.